A research paper by the Department of Veterans Affairs has unveiled that veterans who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011 and were sacked out of the military have increased rates of homelessness than those who have left in normal conditions.

It has been suggested that the military should keep a tab on their service members even after relieving them from duty. The researchers have said that among the ones who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 5.6% were taken out of the military jobs due to misconduct. Out of them, 28.1% were the ones who were homeless in the first year of being taken out of the military.

Study's co-leader, Jamison Fargo, a research scientist with the VA's National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans, said that drug or alcohol use were the main reasons for which the officials were discharged from their military duties.

Fargo said that it has proved to be one of the main risk factors for homelessness observed till date. As per data from the Department of Defense, since 2001, more than 142,000 service members have been dismissed from the military.

The current study is based on the data of the 448,290 VA patients who have served in the recent wars. The researchers using Defense Department codes have divided the veterans into 5 discharge categories. VA records were used to know who has become homeless.

It was found that 1% of the VA patients became homeless within the first year of being discharged from the military. For the ones who were discharged for misconduct, the figure was 5.4%. It has been found that the veterans who were forced to leave the military were almost 7 times more likely to homeless than the ones discharged on normal grounds.